A Distant Heart

by Sonali Dev

  Rahul looked behind him at a plastic curtain that separated him from another room with one of those hospital beds where Kimi lay with her eyes closed. An IV line ran into her arm and she was covered in bright pink sheets. Where her feet should have been two fuzzy yellow rabbit slippers stuck out.

  He stepped back. “It doesn’t matter. We can talk about it later. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.”

  “You’re not intruding. This is my daughter, Kimaya. She’s resting. I’m just sitting here in case she needs anything.”

  Rahul had never heard the ex-film star sound like this. He sounded defeated, and yet as though he would never, ever accept defeat. Rahul had also never seen Kirit so focused and still. He was a man who tended to exude energy and action. Today he seemed almost meditative.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Rahul asked for the third time that day.

  “She’s sick.”

  “Sick with what?”

  “A few things. But basically her body has almost no immunity.”

  “No, I mean what is wrong with her right now? Does she have an infection?” It was strange to see Kimi lying down like that, and he very badly wanted her to open her eyes, because her eyes had a way of dancing. Her baby-doe eyes. How had he forgotten that’s how he had thought of her when he’d seen her on the gatehouse?

  “She has a fever. Usually that means an infection.”

  “So what happens when she has an infection?”

  “We give her a transfusion and pump her body with antibodies and hope that the infection is very minor.”

  “How long will it take?”

  Kirit shrugged. “It can go on for weeks—but the longer it goes, the harder it becomes to get rid of it.” He scrubbed his face and looked up at Rahul as though he didn’t know why he was asking all these questions. “How can I help you?”

  Rahul couldn’t get himself to ask for money for the computer lab. Not right now.

  “Do you need time off? Is it exams? You know you don’t have to work in the yard. It’s been a year. I think you’ve paid off the debt.”

  Rahul wanted to laugh. Kirit had never treated him like a child. Although to be fair, after Baba’s death no one had. But even someone who was bad at math would know that washing windows and scrubbing garden furniture for one year did not earn you two lakh rupees, which is how much Kirit had paid the hospital that night.

  “Would you like to do something else?”

  “Is there something I can do inside the house, perhaps?” In here, where he would be able to check up on Kimi.

  “The library.”

  Both Rahul and Kirit turned around because Kimi had spoken behind the curtain.

  She coughed a little, and Kirit walked to the plastic curtain near the bed, placed his hands inside plastic gloves attached to the curtain, and handed her a glass of water. His shoulders were stiff with relief, which was an oxymoron but it made absolute sense.

  Rahul’s own relief at hearing her voice was almost violent, like a football hitting him in the stomach when someone had kicked it with all their force.

  “Kimi beta, you’re up. How are you feeling?” Kirit asked in a tone that Rahul could never have imagined coming from him.

  “Your library needs to be cataloged, Papa. Remember?”

  “Yes, it does. We’ll take care of it. Are you feeling any pain? I’ll call Sarika to take your temperature.”

  “I feel fine.” She sounded anything but fine. “You’ve always wanted to get someone to catalog the library. Maybe he can do that.”

  “Who? Rahul?”

  “Is that the boy’s name?” she said and winked at Rahul behind her father’s head.

  He waved at her. If his relief had seemed extreme at the sound of her voice, seeing her eyes dance again made him want to dance. Naturally, he held himself utterly stiff. “Hi, I’m Rahul,” he said. “How are you, babyji?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Hi, my name is Kimi. I’m fine. Thank you for asking.”

  Kirit looked from Kimi to Rahul, and Rahul had a sense that he was examining their conversation for something.

  “I should go tell your mamma that you’ve woken up so she can stop harassing her Krishna for a little bit. Rahul, would you like to work in the library? I can get someone to explain cataloging to you.”

  “I did a project on the Dewey Decimal System,” he said, sliding a glance at Kimi. “I’ll be happy to take care of the cataloging.”

  “You can start that tomorrow then,” Kirit said, holding the door open.

  “Bye, Rahul,” she said. Her voice was thin and seemed to take an effort, but her smile split all the way across her face. When she smiled wide enough, her two canines made an appearance, sticking out like playful versions of Count Dracula’s fangs. And instead of being menacing they made her look like she couldn’t stop laughter from bursting out of her.

  She waved. Yup, her eyes were definitely dancing. Terribly tired yet dancing. He found himself smiling when he left The Mansion and walked home through the monsoon-muddy streets with his slippers splattering brown dots up the backs of his legs. He had told her about his library-cataloging project just the previous week.

  17

  Kimi

  A long time ago

  The word breakthrough was regarded with the devotion of sacred texts in their home. Papa regularly combed through every single medical journal to keep up with advances in immunology. Truth be told, ever since they had installed an Internet line, Kimi spent more time than she would admit searching through any medical papers she could find. The research was amazing and totally fascinating. So much so that every once in a while she found herself channeling her vaidya grandfather and wanting to be a doctor so she could do the research herself and fix herself.

  Not that it was her time to decide what she wanted to do with her life. She already knew what she wanted to do. She was starting to worry a little bit about Rahul. It sounded totally Romance Novel Hero, but the boy—well, man, he had just turned nineteen—was so good at everything, he had no passion for anything. Seriously, sometimes she wanted to shake him until all his stoic equanimity flew from him. Then again, she loved that most about him.

  “Why are you glaring at me instead of balancing your chemical equations?”

  As he was aware, balancing equations was her least favorite thing to do. For all his effort and inherent genius (his words, not hers) Rahul hadn’t been able to change her distaste for equations of any sort. Actually, to get into medical college you needed to be really good at chemistry, so there was yet another reason why carrying on her grandfather’s legacy wasn’t happening. If not for Rahul and his thirty tons of patience (and inherent genius, of course), she wouldn’t even be doing advanced organic chemistry. Sometimes she hated him for pushing her into things.

  “Why do you think I’m glaring? This stuff is evil,” she said, sitting up on her wing chair and staring at him across the plastic curtain. She still couldn’t believe that he was allowed to sit in the guest room outside her curtain and tutor her face-to-face—well, face-to-plastic-to-face, but still. All her scheming had worked. When he had first been tasked with cataloging Papa’s library it had taken him a good week to sneak into her room. She had jumped on him. Figuratively, naturally. He’d have to be wrapped in plastic for her to jump on him for real.

  “You took one week to come see me?” she had yelled. Again, figuratively, because yelling would mean he’d have been caught and that would defeat the purpose of yelling in the first place.

  He’d done one of his the-best-response-is-no-reponse things. As though he had been struggling with whether to come and see her or not. For someone so smart with equations (that inherent-genius thing wasn’t entirely untrue), he was such a thickhead when it came to some things.

  “Why would I have suggested the library, which I am fully aware is down the corridor, by the way, if I did not want you to come see me?”

  But she hadn’t been that excited since the first time he’d landed
on her balcony. Excited and furious. She had sat, ears peeled every single day, waiting for him to show up, and he’d taken his own sweet time.

  “It took you an entire week to come see me, and now I am going to flunk my algebra unit test,” she had hissed, loving how great it felt to be able to hiss at someone.

  He had narrowed his eyes at her, a teeny-tiny bit, which meant he was really furious too. “You’ve got me working in the library. How am I supposed to get out on your balcony?”

  For someone so smart. So. Thick.

  “I got you into the house so we wouldn’t have to study across the window, you goose. There’s nobody in the house between four and six, and everyone thinks I’m resting. So you can come in here and we can do the lessons here.”

  His eyes did an “Ah!” then a “Hmm . . .” before he said, “But is it safe?”

  “Are you a dangerous person, then?”

  “Funny. I meant the infection thing. There’s a reason for all this, right?” He’d indicated her room with his chin.

  “There’s a thirty-horsepower motor killing all the germs on this side of the curtain,” she had said. “Just make sure you don’t come running through the curtain in your excitement to see me.” Although, today, she wanted nothing more than to ask him to do just that. God help her.

  For two years he had been squishing all the cataloging work into an hour and a half so he could spend the rest of the time with her. Just one of the many, many reasons he was her best friend. Or, as he loved to remind her, her only friend. Which was a bit mean, if you asked her.

  But she digressed. There were a few issues at hand. For one, there was The Breakthrough, but that meant she had to go away to the hospital for a while again. There had been a few over the past two years—five, actually—so Rahul wasn’t entirely unused to it. The first few times he had been all prepared to be able to see her without the plastic when she returned. He hadn’t learned to manage his expectations back then. But if Rahul was anything he was a quick study. He had learned to manage his hope so fast that instead of being relieved, Kimi had been almost disappointed.

  Not that he had come anywhere near attaining her skill at managing hope. She could balance it like a juggler—let it soar and curb it and pass it from hand to hand. She could spin hope and spin herself through it. Forget mere juggling; she was a veritable trapeze artist with this hope thing.

  His brand of managing hope, on the other hand, reminded her too much of Storm Boy. She wasn’t a fan.

  The difference this time was that she was going to a hospital thousands of miles away. It was the first time she was leaving the country since they’d become friends. She didn’t know if Papa knew he’d been sneaking in. But after her last spate of infections, Papa himself had asked Rahul if he wanted to help her with lessons and he hadn’t had to sneak in anymore. He’d also let him visit when Kimi was sick. Which was great, because she loved hearing his voice, even when she couldn’t respond. For someone as quiet as him, he sure couldn’t stop talking the moment she got sick and passed out. One part of her hoped that he would never find out that she could still hear people when she was too sick to talk or react.

  He had asked her about it once, well, not flat-out asked, but done that typical Rahul-style thing where he slipped a question into a conversation so smoothly no one would know he’d asked. And she’d lied, well, not flat-out lied, but she’d slid past the truth and led him to believe that she was really passed out when she lay there too weak to respond. It’s how she had found out how much he missed his baba, or how out of place he had felt at his school, or how mind-numbingly dull he found engineering college.

  “I’m going to London,” she blurted out, because he already knew she was only pretending to balance those vile equations.

  He put down the book he was reading and sat up in that alert way of his. “What have they found?”

  “Possibly a drug to raise the platelet count.”

  “That would mean no plastic room?”

  “Maybe. But it would definitely mean fewer infections.”

  He stood, energy bursting from him. “That’s fantastic, Kimi.”

  She stood too. They were standing across the curtain the way they had done so many times. The way they did every second day. But today the urge to see him without any barriers, to part the curtain, was so strong it had her bouncing on her heels.

  His gaze moved to the gloves falling limply out of the plastic curtain like the arms of a ghost who had fallen asleep. He had never put his hands in there. Never shown any interest in doing it. Never shown any interest in touching her. She was a sixteen year old girl, and he was the most handsome boy she had ever seen, not to mention the most brilliant. But also the most virtuous. He probably thought it was entirely inappropriate to put his hands there, so to speak.

  “Why are you smiling?” he asked, and she shook her head.

  He followed her gaze to the gloves again, and slipped his hands behind his back.

  It felt like he had physically pushed her away, and for a moment she turned away from him. But there was this thing she always did every time she went to the hospital. She said bye to everything. Not just to the entire staff, but to her room, her bed, the view of the ocean, even the plastic curtain with its limp glove hands. All the things that were so intimately familiar. Because she had this sense that if it were the last time she was seeing these things that made up her life, she wanted to at least have said bye.

  Until now she’d never had to say bye to Rahul. One, because usually, her hospitalizations came unexpectedly and he wasn’t around, and two, because she didn’t want to.

  “Rahul,” she said, and he looked up from the limp gloves.

  “When will you be back?” he said, trying to distract her because he knew he wasn’t going to like what she was about to say.

  “They don’t know how long it could take.” And then, “Mamma and Papa do it, you know.”

  She didn’t have to tell him what she was talking about. He knew.

  “I’m not them. I’m not family. I’m a servant here, Kimi.”

  “You’re not a servant. You’re my best friend.”

  His look at that was so intensely sad, so intensely angry, she almost thought he would do it, reach through the curtain. But he kept his hands behind his back. “None of the servants are allowed to do it.”

  She hated when he called himself that. He knew that wasn’t what he was. He knew Papa only let him work here because Rahul wouldn’t let him help otherwise. She stuck her chin up. “If you’re a servant, you have to listen to me because I’m your master. I want you to. So you have to.”

  He looked amused, and she felt a little less awful about what she had said. But he didn’t move his hands. “Please, Rahul. Would you please? Just once. You may never see me again. Then you’ll have to live with not having given me my dying wish.”

  He tried to roll his eyes and look amused again. “Shut up,” he said and then in his Storm Boy voice, “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I promised your father I’d never touch the curtain.”

  “Why would you make a promise like that?”

  “It’s the only way we could do this, Kimi. It’s the only way I can be here. The only way he would know you were safe.”

  She grabbed the gloves and started flipping them inside out. She had never done this and her heart beat the way it did when she was running a high fever.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You can’t touch the curtain. But I can. I never promised Papa anything.”

  His eyes were what she loved most about him. Tar-black and dark-lashed and deeply shadowed under his thick brows. And they spoke. All the words he couldn’t say. They were so full of those words right now. His body looked like it was gathering energy, getting ready to step away. But he stayed where he was.

  Her hands were inside the gloves. If she reached out, she could touch him.

  He released his hands from behind his back and let them fall t
o his sides. And she did it. She reached for him. Trailing the back of his hands with her fingers. There was a wild zinging awareness, a warmth that flashed up her arm, a lighting up inside her, and she withdrew her hand quickly, her eyes meeting his. Had he felt it too? She couldn’t tell. He swallowed and reached for her this time. Threading his fingers through hers.

  “Are you scared?” he said so softly she almost wanted to ignore the question.

  “Terrified,” she answered as he pressed her fingers apart and let their palms join. “Just a little bit.”

  “How is one terrified just a little bit?” This close up, his lips were thick and sharply etched, as though someone had lined them in marker and then filled them in.

  “I don’t know. I just am.” Sometimes breakthroughs worked. Sometimes they didn’t. It was Dr. Girija’s favorite thing to say. Kimi stubbornly refused to let herself unravel the entire meaning of those words.

  He took the tiniest step closer. “I’ve never met anyone as brave as you, Kimi.”

  She felt a smile split her face even as a lump collected in her throat. “Really? You really think I’m brave?”

  He shook his head in that amused way and smiled back at her but only with his eyes. “Why does that surprise you?”

  “Because I think of bravery as something big and strong people possess. Like soldiers and commandos and policemen. Like you. You would be so good at something like that, something that requires bravery every day.” Years later she’d curse herself for uttering those words.

  His fingers tightened around hers and then let go. His face got all strained and awfully serious.

  “What happened? What did I say?”

  But he never answered anything the first time she asked him. At least nothing that was important. That’s how she knew what was important to him and what wasn’t. It was in how hard she had to push before he gave it out. “Tell me, Rahul.” She reached for his hands again.